Queen

  ALEXHALEYS

  QUEEN

  The Story of an American Family

  ALEX HALEY

  AND DAVID STEVENS

  AVON BOOKS & NEW YORK

 

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that

  this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed"

  to the publisher. and neither the author nor the publisher has received

  any payment for this "stripped book."

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  1350 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10019

  Copyright C) 1993 by the Estate of Alexandet Palmer Haley, Myran E.

  Haley, and David Stevens Published by arrangement with the author

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-47089 ISBN: 0-380-70275-4

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or

  portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S.

  Copyright Law.

  Published in hardcover by William Morrow and Company, Inc.; for in-

  formation address Permissions Department, William Morrow and Company,

  Inc., 1350 Avenue of the Americas. New York, New York 10019.

  First Avon Books Printing: February 1994

  AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21

  Dedicated to the memory of Alex Haley

  And to the African, Kanyuro, of the Kikuyu, who saved my life during a

  small skirmish in an obscure war on the Kenya/Uganda border, and gave

  me the priceless gift of the years since then.

  Acknowledgments

  The role played by David Wolper in Alex's career, and, latterly, my own,

  is remarkable, but I would also like to record my gratitude to Bernard

  Sofronski, who first had the idea of associating me with Alex and this

  project.

  My thanks also to Mark Wolper and John Erman. To Jeff Sagansky, John

  Matoyan, and Larry Strichman. To Paul Bresnick, and everyone at William

  Morrow.

  To Louis Blau, and to George Haley, Alex's brother, and William Haley,

  Alex's son.

  To my agent, Irv Schwartz, who is the best, a pillar of support and a

  valued friend. To Fiona McLauchlan and Daniel Donnelly, for their help

  in research. To the staff at Alex's farm, who adopted me and nicknamed

  me The Moonshine Kid, and especially Gertie Brummitt, who first let me

  into the secret.

  To Bubby, with love. And Rooney, Myrtle, Maggie, and Dudley. And Morgan,

  whom we miss.

  On Alex's behalf, it is ittcumbent on me to record his gratitude to Myran

  E. Haley, his wife and valued associate, and to George Sims, his lifelong

  friend and master researcher.

  PART ONE

  BLOODLINES

  Hurra for the Hickory Tree! Hurra for the Hickory Tree! Its branches

  will wave 0'er tyranny's grave And bloomfor the brave And the fi-ee.

  -PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN SONG, 1832

  On a cold and rainy April night, in a guarded garret somewhere in Dublin,

  James Jackson 11, known as Jamie, swore a most sacred, solemn oath.

  "In the awful presence of God, 1, Jamie Jackson, do voluntarily swear and

  declare that I will form a brotherhood among Irishmen of every religion,

  for equal, full, and adequate representation of all Irishmen. Not hopes,

  fears, rewards, or punishment shall ever induce me to inform on, or to

  give evidence against, any member of this society. So help me God."

  It was the year 1797. Jamie was barely fifteen. There were eleven other

  men in the room, for no cell of the illegal association could be larger

  than twelve. He had been sponsored into the group by his uncle Henry.

  Partly because of the eloquence with which young Jamie voiced his

  convictions, partly because they needed every man they could get in the

  fight against the occupying British, but mostly out of respect for his

  uncle, not one black bean was cast against him.

  Three months previously, a fleet of forty French ships carrying twelve

  thousand men had sailed toward Bantry Bay, in southern Ireland, to drive

  the British from the country. On the flagship, Indomitable, was Wolfe

  Tone, who had persuaded Napoleon that the British could be defeated. The

  weather went against them, and high winds and heavy rainfall frustrated

  the landing of men from the French fleet. The storm raged for six days,

  forcing the ships, one by one, to cut cable and seek safe harbor, until

  the Indomitable stood alone. Then she too turned about and limped back

  to France.

  When news of the retreat at Bantry Bay reached Dublin Castle, Lord Clair,

  the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, personally appointed by King George 111,

  made a jubilant proclamation.

  3

  4 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN

  "It was a Protestant victory! It saw God on our side!"

  lie intensified the suppression of the United Ireland movement, he

  ordered massive recriminations against the intransigent Irish peasants,

  and finally he declared martial law.

  The ferocity with which the British troops enforced his orders shocked

  even the most moderate of men, and Jamie, appalled by what he saw, made

  his decision and formally cast his lot with the Irish cause.

  He was not the only member of his Protestant family to have made such a

  dangerous commitment.

  His older brother John had abandoned Ireland and gone to America with

  three of his brothers, but his older sister Eleanor was married to Oliver

  Bond, a leader in the secret association. His sister Martha had married

  Hu-h Hanna, whom Jamie believed to be a "Peep 0' Day Boy," a vigilante

  group mostly from the peasant class. Under cover of night, toward dawn,

  the Peep 0' Days took what small vengeance they could against the

  occupying British troops.

  His sister Sara was engaged to Jimmy Hanna, Hugh's brother, who had been

  tutor to Jamie when he was a boy in Ballybay, and had helped to awaken

  his social conscience. Jamie's uncle, Henry Jackson, with whom he lodged

  while he was at school in Dublin, was leader of the small cell that Jamie

  had joined.

  Yet Jamie was an unlikely revolutionary. The eleventh of twelve children,

  he was bom to comparative wealth, and grew up in an atmosphere of

  privilege and security. His father, James Jackson, owned many acres of

  land and a linen mill at Ballybay, near Carrickmacross, in County

  Monaghan. The British were well disposed to those native-born Irish who

  espoused their religion and respected their authority, and James Jackson

  had flourished under their colonial dominion.

  A stem, intolerant man, James Jackson loved the English way of life, and

  had little sympathy for the Catholic peasants. It appalled him that so

  many of his children had chosen to embrace the nation
alist cause, and

  thus put everything he had worked for and achieved, and their own

  inheritance, at risk. He could not understand that it was the bloodless

  austerity of his heart and manner that had driven his children to seek

  love

  BLOODLINES 5

  and companionship in the camaraderie of political passion. He was

  dispassionate toward his family and, except in matters of procreation,

  detached frorn his wife. Other than the marital bed, his only passion was

  his hobby, the breeding of champion racehorses.

  When Jamie was eighteen months old, his mother gave birth to another boy,

  Washington, and died four months later, at thirty-five, worn out from

  childbearing and a loveless marriage. Jugs, the family housekeeper,

  became surrogate mother to Jamie and his infant brother, and she came to

  love Jamie as the son she had never had, and he basked in her affection.

  Gravel-voiced, toothless, bosomy, and superstitious, the Catholic Jugs

  had served in the Jackson household as loyal friend and confidante to

  Jamie's mother, Mary Steele Jackson, whom she had nursed from infancy.

  After Mary's death, she ran the house with peasant discipline, faced

  trouble by first crossing herself and then wielding a big stick, and

  tended toward earthy language after a few nips of her master's brandy.

  She knew every Irish superstition in the book, and practiced most of

  them, especially those that were said to placate the fairies.

  It was she who introduced Jamie to the world outside his father's bleak

  and loveless estate. Several times a week, Jugs went to visit her sister,

  Maureen, and her husband, Patrick, a tenant farmer on the neighboring

  Hamilton land. Maureen had a son, Sean, of Jamie's age and Jugs took

  Jamie with her on these visits because she thought the boy needed a

  companion. They became more than playmates. From widely diverse back-

  grounds, Jamie and Sean quickly became fast friends, and grew up in each

  other's company.

  Maureen's simple home was paradise for a young boy whose own was cold and

  formal. The cottage had a thatch roof, mud walls, an earthen floor, and

  a vibrant sense of life, of passion and laughter and anger. The loom was

  the largest piece of furniture, and in the winter the cow lived inside

  with the rest of the family.

  Jamie loved the simple formalities of peasant life. Whenever he went in

  through the door he would say, "Blessings upon all I see," as Jugs had

  taught him. He teamed some words of Gaelic. When Maureen churned butter,

  she recited to him the

  6 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN

  legends of it. If milk splashed during the churning he would be doomed to

  marry a drunken spouse. If someone "blinked" your cow, he learned how to

  break the curse. When the butter finally broke, he twisted the staff three

  times, and placed it over the mouth of the chum, and he helped her smear

  a little of the butter on the wall of the cottage as an offering to the

  fairies.

  He loved the stories that the shanachies, the traveling storytellers,

  recited of the leprechauns and the little folk, and he believed in the

  fairies, who lived on the mist-shrouded Crieve Mountain nearby. He loved

  the great history of the Gaelic people, and of the blessed Saint Patrick

  who had converted them to Christianity, and had rid the island of snakes

  by tapping with his staff upon the earth. He learned of the glories of

  the time of kings and poets, and of the Viking raiders, who were defeated

  at Clontarf by Brian Bom. He heard the long history of invasion by the

  British, who were determined to subjugate the Emerald Isle, from Henry

  11 to the ruthless, hated Oliver Cromwell. Of the Protestant settlers

  brought from England and Scotland to be settled in the north, to reduce

  the influence of the Catholics. He heard of repression and rebellion,

  evictions and retaliations, and the suppression of the Catholic religion

  that followed the Irish defeat at the Battle of the Boyne.

  He wept when he heard the stories of the potato blight, and the awful

  famine that followed, which decimated the population and forced many of

  those who did not die to emigrate, mostly to America. He cursed the

  British for what they did then, expropriating yet more land, because the

  peasants, who could not afford to eat, could not pay their rent. He

  gasped at the stories of the White Boys, who refused to pay tax, and rode

  through the night cutting off the noses and cars of tax collectors, but

  never harming the innocent.

  He wept again at the tales of the reprisals against the White Boys, how

  they put the tar cap of molten, burning pitch on the peasant's head, and

  mocked him while he screamed in agony, unable to remove the fiery mess.

  His blood ran hot at the stories of indiscriminate flogging and looting

  and rape, or the British soldier's sport of setting fire to the hay in

  a peasant's cart and ramming the flaming

  BLOODLINES 7

  cart into the man's house, laughing while the cottage burned. Most of all, he

  loved Sean, and tried to emulate his hero in every way. A moderate and

  studious boy, who grieved for the mother he had never known and sorely

  missed his father's affections, Jamie found in the rollicking, boisterous

  Sean a friend who filled the emotional void in his heart. Through the days

  of their childhood they were inseparable, roaming the lanes between

  Ballybay and Carrickmacross, the daring Sean leading the wide-eyed Jamie

  into scrapes and adventures and pranks.

  Sean taught Jamie to play the wild game of hurley, and how to cut turf

  from the peat bogs, stack it in barrows, and take it back to the cottage

  to dry, to be used as fuel for the fire. They visited Sean's father at

  the Jackson linen mill, and Jamie watched in amazement the arduous labor,

  as the flax was hackled and scutched, and the peasant women toiled over

  great steaming kettles boiling the spun thread to purify it. They went

  to the annual Ballybay Fair together, and reveled in the fun of it, the

  tinkers and fiddlers, and the increasingly drunken peasants dancing

  increasingly drunken gigs. They giggled at the man with the shillelagh

  and long tailcoat who earned his living by challenging stalwarts to "step

  on his coat" and fight with him. They watched the races, dazzled by the

  bright colors of the silks the jockeys wore, and cheered the winners

  until their throats were sore, and, at the subsequent auction, pretended

  to bid for horses they could not afford.

  When they grew older, and Jamie's father took a mistress, Sarah Black,

  who lived in Carrickmacross, it was Sean who taught Jamie about girls,

  and the great mysteries of sex, and it was Sean who first introduced

  Jamie to the wonders of beer and poteen, for the boy could not understand

  his father's faithlessness to the memory of his dead mother.

  In all things they were as brothers, but although their ages were

  similar, it was Sean who led and Jamie who follo
wed. They bridged, with

  the easy bond of youth, the many chasms that their different positions

  in society created for them, and they nurtured each other in spite of

  these differences, and drew strength from them. Once Jamie had Maureen

  crop his hair short, in the peasant-boy manner, the more to identify with

  his sunshine friend. When he went home, his father whipped him,

  8 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN

  and forbade him to leave the house until his hair had grown out, and Jamie

  kept his hair long after that.

  So Jamie grew up with an appreciation of the life and hardships of the

  mass of the people. His other world of his father's ambition, and of

  class and privilege, bored Jamie, and made him long to be back with his

  peasant friends. Yet he could not avoid that other life.

  Much of Ballybay was owned by the Leslie family, impoverished minor

  English aristocracy, who, lacking funds, were happy to accept the sometime

  friendship and occasional loans of James Jackson, whom otherwise they

  regarded as a man of 'trade and not of their social quality. For a while

  they were prepared to consider the possibility of an acquaintance between

  James Jackson's children and their own, and invited Jamie and Washington

  to spend an afternoon with their own children. Dressed in their best and

  sworn to good behavior by Jugs, they were driven by old Quinn, the

  hostler, in a fine gig with handsome horses.

  Jamie and Washington took a stiffly formal tea with the Leslie boy and

  girl, attended by their governess, whose manners were as starched as her

  dress and high collar. Afterward, they were taken outside to play in the

  formal gardens of the small castle. They strolled politely through the

  grounds until they came to a fence that bordered a cow pasture. Young Ja-

  mie, the devil in him, dared the Leslie girl to run through the pasture

  with him. She accepted.

  The governess, furious, raced after them, calling on her charge to watch

  her step, but it was too late. The girl slipped on a cow pat and fell to

  the ground. When Jamie went to help her up, he slipped too, in the same

  pat. The girl began to cry, and the governess berated Jamie for what he

  had done. He was suitably contrite at first, but the sight of the primped

  girl covered in cow dung was too much for him, and he started to laugh.

  This infuriated the victim.

  "Go away, you bloody Irish ass!" she cried. The governess boxed her ears

  for her language but not her sentiments, dragged her away, and told Jamie

  he was a horrid little boy, who was never to come near them again.

  Old Quinn drove the boys home, his nose wrinkling at the

  BLOODLINES 9

  smell of cow manure coming from the seat behind him, but his eyes

  twinkling with delight at the cheek of his young master. Washington was

  in awe of his slightly older brother, and Jamie could not wait to tell

  Sean.

  That afternoon caused something of a change in Jamie's relationship with

  old Quinn. Previously, the stable master had regarded him as a bit of a

  nuisance, a bothersome boy who had to be taught to ride, and whose

  presence in the stables distracted Quinn from his true passion, and

  disturbed his precious Thoroughbred mares. Following the incident at the

  Leslies', Quinn, who detested everything British except racing stock,

  took more time with Jamie, and found in him a natural talent for riding.

  He encouraged Jamie's interest in horses, and astonished the boy with the

  breadth of his knowledge. He could recount the bloodline of every horse

  in his stable, their ages, sires, and dams, back through several

  generations. He instructed the boy in their care and management, he

  advised him of the potential of any new colt, and by the time Jamie was

  a young man, he had acquired much of Quinn's knowledge, as well as his

  passion. All the animals were divided into separate stables, the racing

  horses in one, the riding horses in another, and the workhorses in a

  third, because, Quinn insisted, the bloodlines could not be mixed.